Indian film industry faces its biggest ever crisis with advent of video and television, changing audience tastes

The Indian film industry faced its biggest crisis in its long and distinguished history during the last decade. Television, the video boom, changing audience tastes and budgetary factors have all contributed to the fading glitter of Bombay's dream factories. The number of flops now far outnumber the hits and Indian commercial filmmakers found themselves groping in the dark.

Then Amitabh Bachchan flew into Bombay last fortnight for the mahurat of Manmohan Desai's newest fantasia Ganga Jumna Saraswati where he leads the star cast.it was history coming full circle. At a slightly jowly 43, Amitabh looked decidedly less angry and less young than 1 years ago.

At that time in Deevar, a character had prophesied about him: "Yeh lambi race ka ghoda hai." That prophecy came true as the tall and lanky actor galloped his way into the Lok Sabha. However, unlike the superstar, the mass cinema industry after a few years of fast canter has now virtually collapsed on the track.

And it all happened as rapidly as if somebody had flicked the fast forward switch on a video player. Ten years ago, Hindi cinema was travelling into its high noon, riding on the electric wave of Sholay and Amitabh Bachchan. But 10 years later, in the flicker of a film frame, the high pulse momentum is gone with the wind.

The old patriarchs of Bandra and juhu still clutch at straws in the wind, pinning their hopes in a handful of freak successes - a Ram Teri Ganga Maili here and a Mard there - but deep down in their hearts the 3.3 lakh people involved in the country's dream factory are so filled with a sense of futility that they are ready to pack and leave.

"The industry has suddenly aged. Its problem is the geriatric problem of not being able to throw up new dreams."Amit Khannafilm maker

It is not only the profitability of the film industry where the rot
has set in. The decay is all-pervasive. afflicting economy, aesthetics
and the pure fun value of the 850-odd films that the country's 70
studios churn out every year.

The show still goes on, but what has indeed ebbed away - besides profits - is the capacity of the silver screen to keep its audience spellbound in the darkened theatre. "Ten years ago," says an aging doyen of the film industry, "people were identifying with Amitabh Bachchan. Now they just watch him."

Even now successes alternate with failures and mega-hits still occur. In just four weeks, Desai's latest film Mard has drawn from the market nearly Rs 3.5 crore - its cost price after paying half the collections to the Government in entertainment tax.

Raj Kapoor's Ram Teri Ganga Maili, a corny poem of overflowing rivers and overfilled breasts, has pulled more crowds to the theatres than any two of his earlier films in the last 10 years put together.

But for every film that just covered its cost in 1985, eight films have lost the race and in many cases the men involved have gone bankrupt, pawned the last piece of their wives' jewellery, attempted suicide. gone insane or found refuge in the bottle.

Silsila: Box office disaster

Says top-flight distributor Gulshan Rai, who used to distribute 15 films every year but has of late shrunk away from business: "There are many more casualties today than 10 years ago. I'd imagine that buying lottery tickets today is a safer investment than making films."

Of the 132 films made in 1983, only 17 managed to recover their cost. In 1975, about half of the Hindi films made money. In 1983, the industry as a whole suffered a net loss of Rs 92.7 crore. This is expected to go up to Rs 120 crore by the time the accounts close this year.

But in 1975 the film industry, always a loser on the aggregate, could nevertheless keep down the losses to just Rs 12 crore. Ten years ago, the stars were grooming their children to either face or move the camera.

Now septuagenarian movie moghul G.P. Sippy, who produced Sholay, says: "I came to Bombay as a property agent and builder. With me, my sons also joined films. But I'm sure my grandchildren will never be in show business. Never."

"It is not only cash that has dwindled," says film-maker Amit Khanna,"the industry has suddenly aged. Its problem is the geriatric problem of not being able to throw up new dreams." In 1975, besides Amitabh there was a glittering battery of charismatic actors and actresses - Rajesh Khanna, Dharmendra.

Manoj Kumar, Dev Anand, and Dilip Kumar who had not yet gone grey, Sharmila Tagore, Hema Malini and Mumtaz. Today, Amitabh alone stands like the lone tree of the Tao legend. In fact, the "heroine" has made an unsung exit from the scene meanwhile, giving way to a galaxy of teeny-weenies who are employed purely as cheesecake.

"It is not enough to cast me. Because once you have put me there, you've raised the expectations of the audience. You must know how to handle me, how to give me a lot of things to do."Amitabh Bachchan,film actor

But there are exceptions to every rule. Shabana Azmi, for one. has
been rated by no less than film maker Mrinal Sen as one of the "10-best
actresses in the world. And Smita Patil is another who had the rare
distinction of a retrospective of her films in Paris.

Other than
such exceptions, the young bunch of today's top performers is working
overtime to slog it to the top and attain that elusive charisma which
makes all the difference between an actor and a star. Jackie Shroff
never drinks and takes his script to bed.

Anil Kapoor works out at the squash courts of Sea Rock Hotel one hour every day, jogs two miles, practises gestures before the mirror whenever alone and tries to study
his roles as intently as Shakespeare plotted his plays. Sunny Deol
wonders if father Dharmendra had paid as much attention to his job as
the youngsters of today do.

They all hate what they privately call the "Rajesh Khanna syndrome" of excessive drinking, skylarking and five-star bohemianism. But ironically, despite so much of effort, nobody in the present generation has achieved that charisma.

It is the charisma of Amitabh, the willowy Allahabad lad who could fight the world single-handed, that had put the mass cinema on a tornado-like growth path in the mid-70s.

It rose to new heights, powered by two failed actors - Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar - who took to writing film scripts and painted the tinsel town literally red with gore and raw violence, interspersed with dialogue straight from the 'chawls'.

Enter directors like Prakash Mehra, Ramesh Sippy, Manmohan Desai and Yash Chopra - men of a more go-getting generation, swashbucklers of celluloid who could go to any length to make a scene grab the audiences.

Cinema soon became an addiction. Against 5.5 million people watching cinema daily, 10 million people flocked to the theatre in 1976. "It was a miracle, it was like a big bang, the beginning of the universe," says Salim Khan who lives mostly with his memories.

The frenetic years produced some vibrant cinema. When a child-actor in Deewar playing Amitabh as a boy, polished Iftekhar's shoes but refused a coin thrown at him, saying: "Mein joote saaf karta hoon, bheekh nahin mangta hoon, paise utha ke do", it became the talk of every little street urchin in the country.

Gabbar Singh's famous line in Sholay - "Arre o Samba" - turned into a folk legend, the sound track of the film alone having sold more than 600,000 copies in discs and cassettes.

And in Prakash Mehra's Muqaddar ka Sikander, when Rekha
serenaded Amitabh with "Salaam-i-ishq merijaan zara kabool kar lo", the
message wafted across to millions of homes, blown by the new hi-fi
revolution gathering momentum in the country.

And while the cash
registers were jingling, a bonanza of new technology arrived. Film speed became faster, making shooting easier in insufficient light. The advent of portable halogen lights allowed for more of location shooting,
slowly changing the texture of films.

Ek Duje Ke Liye: Trend setting success

Dozens of new dubbing theatres
came up in the late 70s, changing the quality of the sound track by
making it crisper and noise-free.

There was a spurt in the number of colour laboratories. The biggest mandarin of the technology change
was L.V. Prasad, the octogenarian movie moghul from Madras who had begun his career as an usher at the old Krishna cinema in Bombay. Prasad set
up his 70mm stereophonic sound processing facilities in Madras, the only one in Asia outside Japan and the spectrum of sound changed.

"But," says G.P. Sippy, "the real quantum jump was in budget. We realised the
limits to which the market could be flexed." Till the mid-70s, no
distributor would buy the rights of a star-loaded film for a major
territory at anything above Rs 10 lakh. Eyebrows were raised when Sippy
demanded and got Rs 22 lakh for Sholay but thereafter, the sky became
the limit. Desai's latest film Mard, which is in the theatres now, has
reportedly sold for Rs 66 lakh per territory.

But the heady wine
of success was blended with the slow poison of decay. "We created a Taj
Mahal on bamboo stilts" Mehra now cynically admits. Many were actually
sleepwalking down the sunset boulevard, without thinking the market can
be stretched only up to a point and not beyond.

"The masses are no idiots sitting in the dark hall, or by staying away they are constantly in communication with men like us. They are telling us all the time their current likes and dislikes."Raj Kapoor,film maker and actor

And as inflation eroded the profits, the film fraternity realised that
they had driven the bandwagon to the edge of the precipice. "It is no
longer an industry," remarks Gulshan Rai. "It has become the collective
deathwish of a handful of people like us who are intoxicated with the
neon lights."

The debacle began in the early '80s when Shaan, an over-budgeted film by Ramesh Sippy - the maker of Sholay - badly bombed at the box-office. It was followed by a series of costly flops: Yash Chopra's Silsila,
Kamal Amrohi's Razia Sultan, Mahaan, Inquilab, Mashaal, Pukar - the most disconcerting thing for the industry was that they bombed despite
Amitabh being associated with most of them.

It was the first sign of an archetype getting subjected to the law of diminishing returns.
"It is not enough to cast me," Amitabh confesses now, "because once you
have put me there, you've raised the expectations of the audience. You
must know how to handle me, how to give me a lot of things to do."

That meant money, and with inflation and entertainment tax taking their toll the industry wasn't exactly flush with it. In 1983, out of a total
collection of Rs 984 crore from ticket sales the state governments
claimed Rs 497 crore in taxes and not content with it, the Centre
claimed another Rs 8.5 crore as excise and other duties on prints.

Then theatre owners took away 65 per cent of the rest, leaving just about Rs 170 crore for the entire show business. "It is like hundreds of hungry
vultures scrambling for one piece of dry bone," says Prakash Mehra who,
sometime back thought of making a film to be called Sarkari Dakoo.

The small screen revolution too has also taken its toll. Of the estimated half a million VCR and VCP sets in the country, claims Amit Khanna, at least one lakh are in commercial use, spewing out mostly pirated prints of the popular films in hotel rooms, illegal parlours and video coaches. The video boom has already killed the overseas territory which in 1975 accounted for 20 per cent of a successful film's total business.

The Producers' Guild assesses loss because of video and television boom at 30 per cent. Rising cost calls for rising revenue but that has not happened with films. After paying the entertainment tax and an inexplicable one per cent levy of gross takings for showing the obligatory films division news roundup, the revenue from the same seat has risen by 10 to 15 per cent only.

And, rupee to rupee, both film making and exhibition have lost viability. Sholay cost over Rs 3 crore in 1975. A film with the same production values now will cost no less than Rs 10 crore. In the first 18 months of its run, Sholay netted around Rs 12 crore.

Today the extent of business of a Sholay alone can be no more than the same amount, because the video invasion has chipped away a film's repeat value. "The cinema of great scale does not make sense anymore," says Ramesh Sippy.

Paar: New low-cost cinema

There have still been low-cost wonders. Like Govind Nihalani's Ardh Satya, Mahesh Bhatt's Saraansh, and Goutam Ghose's Paar - targeted narrowly to the art-conscious upper middleclass urban audiences who constitute the thin icing on India's social cake. But unfortunately their appeal has never gone beyond the narrow segment to which they are addressed.

Satyajit Ray's Shatranj Ke Khilari ran for months together in London and New York but in Aligarh, not very far from the film's milieu, the audiences were so enraged by the seemingly endless maneouvres with the chess pieces that they smashed up theatre furniture.

"The masses are no idiots" says Raj Kapoor, flushed with his latest success, "sitting in the dark hall, or by staying away they are constantly in communication with men like us. They are telling us all the time their current likes and dislikes." It is true that for many years they had lapped up the fantasy of protest, exemplified by Amitabh.

But also liked in between a film like Ek Duje Ke Liye, a tale of passion and sensuality in which Kamalahasan gave a resounding performance. Now they are flocking to Ram Teri (expected business in 18 months Rs 7.5 crore) and Mard (Rs 10 crore) neither of which uses the protest format strongly.

"There are many more casualties today than 10 years ago. I'd imagine that buying lottery tickets today is a safer investment than making films."Gulshan Rai,film distrubuter

Raj Kapoor says that "brutalising" cinema is born in a society "that is gripped by a fear of impotence" but he forcefully argues that "Ramboism" creates its own backlash too, forcing men into looking for objects that they can love.

He mentions Spielberg's E.T. and his latest Back to the Future. Like Raj Kapoor, there are many in the show business keeping their antennae alert, trying to capture the fleeting obsessions of the faceless masses. In 1975 they found the answer. Today they are groping in the dark.

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